Is it possible to bring this motherboard back from the dead via the dark arts of BIOS flashing with inexpensive reprogrammers? Join me on this journey where I find out that I’m not a clever as I think I am, an already low bar.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk for reasons we’ll get to, we have a cautionary tale, not a tutorial. So please don’t follow along unless you like ordering replacement parts. In fact, overall it’s a sad tale of ultimate failure, so if you must have a happy ending close off this video and head off to a massage parlour.
I mentioned in passing during the Kolink Rocket build a few weeks back that I’d somehow bricked a motherboard when turning secure boot on. Well, here it is, and I’m going to try to fix it.
I’m re-enacting this mainly for the sake of the video, but it wouldn’t be the first time something’s apparently fixed itself by taking a long rest, the Dungeons and Dragons approach to repair. No such luck, and as you see we are getting power to all the appropriate bits, fans spinning, power to the USB peripherals, processor warming up indicating something’s happening, but no video out.
The first troubleshooting step was to buy a Ryzen 5 2400G, in case it’s somehow stuck trying to output to integrated graphics that weren’t built in to the R5 5600 I’d been using. Bit of a stretch but worth a try, however no dice with that or any discrete graphics card I have lying around.
So, my assumption was that the board’s BIOS was corrupted somehow during changing settings, to the point where it’s not able to boot. The usual resetting procedures didn’t help, no matter how long the reset button is held or the battery left unplugged.
The next step was to reprogram the BIOS chip with a flasher tool. But I don’t own one, so that means all this goes back into the box until that arrives from China.
This CH341A programmer is almost certainly a cheap clone of some better original piece of kit, but it should do what I need and I can’t justify spending much more on something I may never use again.
The idea here is that if I can’t get the computer to flash itself, by Grabthar’s Hammer I’ll do it to it. This clips on to the bios chip, whose markings tell me is the catchily-named WINBOND W25Q128JWSIQ. We all remember that classic advertising jingle, don’t we?
The clip attaches to the programmer, the programmer bone attaches the computer bone, and a software program writes the bios update directly to the chip, after downloading that from the manufacturer’s website of course.
So, here’s me giving that a go. Now, people who actually know what they are doing, or stopped to properly read this datasheet will be wincing as what I’ve done is ram 3.3V through a 1.8V part. If it wasn’t dead before, pretty sure I killed if here.
Annoyingly, I did read the datasheet before doing this, so there’s really no excuse apart from rampant stupidity. No surprise that I’m just getting an assortment of unrecognised chip errors, and although it goes through the motions of writing to the flash, it can only read back an empty rom. Womp womp.
That means all this goes back into the box for a few weeks until some replacement chips arrive from China.
It was as cheap to order five from China as it was for one locally, and as this isn’t urgent and I have now established a track record of ruining chips, maybe best to have a few spare on hand.
Step one is to flash the bios to the blank chip, and after more fiddling around than I’d like, the clip is attached and this time we make sure to use this interposing board that drops the voltage to the necessary 1.8 volts. We load the BIOS into the AsProgrammer software, flash it over, and then i’m going to read it back out, save it to a file and compare it to the original file using the Windows FC command line tool.
Now, this is just for my peace of mind, really, the ASProgrammer software does a verify check itself, but double checking won’t hurt.
Now we need to swap the bios chip on the board with this newly created one. As a hail mary, seeing as it was all set up I did again try reprogramming the old and busted bios just in case, as I’m not super confident with board level rework, but to no avail, it’s still busted, so time to dust off the hot air rework station.
This was another budget, thirty odd quid pick from many years back that I’ve not used in, well, many years, but it’s time for this overblown hairdryer to shine again. I’ve removed the CPU Cooler mounting bracket to avoid melting it, and I’m trying to Kapton tape as much of the surrounding microscopic surface components around the area as possible to protect them from heat, as I don’t want to be reattaching any of those should they also come off.
A few doses of many years old Chipquik should help, if it’s still good that is, and indeed after a bit of heating up, the old BIOS comes off easily enough, and the new one goes on, well, I’m not going to say easily exactly, but it does go on.
On visual inspection it looks like the chip legs are down on the pads, and later on I’ll check the continuity with a multimeter and that confirms it’s on where it should be, although you’d not mistake this for factory condition.
So I’m feeling quite pleased with myself as I get this rigged up for re-testing, only to be met with exactly the same behaviour as before. Womp womp.
Clearly there’s something else wrong with the board, but it’s now beyond my knowledge on how to repair. That means it goes back into the box, well, permanantly I guess, unless you good people out in YouTubeland can suggest something that I can try to resurrect this.
A shame, as I have a few video ideas that need an AM4 ITX board. Where’s an AliExpress sale when you need it?
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